What are Nurture Marketing Campaigns?
A nurture campaign is an inbound marketing strategy that builds long-term connections with potential clients. Nurture marketing takes a long-haul approach to know your audience. They provide them with valuable knowledge through content marketing.
- Who is your audience?
- What valuable knowledge do you have that they should know?
- How will you communicate with them?
- What do you want to get out of your nurture campaign?
Once you have answered these questions, you can start a successful nurture campaign that generates quality relationships with your leads.
Nurture Email Marketing Campaigns
Nurture campaigns are typically done via email, however they include multiple parts. They can include direct mail as well. Nurture emails provide education, while building a relationship with your audience. Communicating through email with potential leads develops conversations over time.
It is important when creating your nurture strategy that you have a clear goal. What do you want your audience to do? You cannot create content and expect leads to come to you, but there are some tricks you can learn. Imagine you are sending an email informing your audience about the current employment crisis. You need to include “want to learn more about resolving your staffing issues” in your email.
You have three goals to keep in mind when writing emails:
- Define your audience.
- Become a hub of information to your leads.
- Create a clear call-to-action (CTA).
Define your audience
Some of the best ways to find your target audience is to gather a list of people and analyze what you know about them. What careers do they have? What is their current title? Is there a pattern in their ages? Where do they live?
One of the best ways to determine who your target audience is to analyze your past candidates. Keeping important data on past clients will help you understand your audience better. During the vetting process, ask them questions that make you better understand them.
Another way to get valuable information from past clients is by creating and distributing surveys.
Once you have gathered enough information about your candidates, you can start to segment your list. Segmenting your list will give the right information to the right audience. If your email is talking about the current hiring challenges in IT, your list should only include individuals that work in technology.
Become a hub of information for your leads
When creating an email in a nurture campaign, you want to give your audience a teaser of valuable information. The email should give a synopsis of the attached blog article, infographic, or piece of content from your website. Think about the content as a package and the email as FedEx. In order to deliver the piece of content, you need to use a delivery service, which is your emails. Your emails need to be captivating, making the reader want to stay along the journey.
Once you have established which piece of content you will sample from and write your engaging and informational email, it is time to create the call-to-action.
Create a clear call-to-action (CTA)
You write a blog article as part of your nurture campaign. Once the blog is written, you want to send it to the list of targeted candidates. To make the email valuable, you need to create a clear call-to-action or CTA. A CTA is the next step that you want your customer to take in the process. Your email is a summarized version of your blog, so you will want to direct your audience to the blog article hosted on your website. In this case, your CTA could be “click to read more.”
Call-to-actions are one of the most important components to any email marketing campaign. You want to get your audience out of the list and onto your website. Once they read the blog, make sure to have another call-to-action to guide them to their next destination. Do you want them to search jobs on your website? Do you want them to contact one of your recruiters?
Call-to-action’s help:
- Remove decision fatigue: Simple directive buttons or statements help candidates point where to go and what to do next, making it easier for them to decide.
- Direct your audience: With a clear call to action, you lessen the risk of your audience clicking off your email or website. If each page content element has a call-to-action, the reader will stay engaged longer.
- Improve communication and engagement: The more individuals that follow your CTAs, the more leads you will have.
Something as simple as a button saying “Search Jobs” is enough to move a lead to a candidate. Although your call-to-action is important, your content is just as important. The purpose of these emails is to create a trusting relationship between you and your potential leads. The content needs to establish credibility in your brand.
What is Content Marketing
Content marketing is a big part of nurture campaigns. What is content marketing?
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
This form of marketing can be infographics, blog posts, emails, social media posts, etc. The purpose of content marketing is to educate your audience on a topic you are an expert in. 
One of the oldest examples of content marketing is John Deere’s “The Furrow”. “The Furrow” is a magazine established in 1889 for farmers to have an unbiased source of information on all things farming. Becoming a source of valuable information on soil conditions and farming tips helped give John Deer credibility to readers of the Furrow. To this day, John Deere still publishes the magazine and uses it as one of its content marketing strategies.
Other examples of content marketing for staffing firms:
- Creating hiring guides
- Filming a YouTube video about improving your interview skills
- Writing a blog post about the current job market
- Designing an infographic for social media with the hottest most in-demand jobs
You can turn your leads into clients by creating valuable, accurate content with a clear-defined call-to-action.
About S.J.Hemley
S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations. www.sjhemleymarketing.com